After much thought, we have decided to change the license under which OGRE is provided. Effective immediately, OGRE will be licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) instead of the GNU General Public License (GPL). This means that it will be possible to use OGRE for closed-source (and hence commercial) applications.
So many of you will be thinking ‘Why the change of heart?’. Well, originally I wanted to release OGRE under the GPL only. I personally like the GPL, I think it offers a lot of protection to open source developers and challenges the thinking of traditional development models.
However, as OGRE has matured, more and more people have told me that they would dearly love to use OGRE but are prevented from doing so by it’s license, because they feel they cannot release their software under the GPL. Pushing aside for the moment the debate over whether this is the ‘right’ approach or not, it is a very real case that these developers would reluctantly go elsewhere because of the GPL.
My original intended solution was to release OGRE under a parallel license which would require a license fee for those people who didn’t want to comply with the GPL. However, after looking into the contractual and legal hoops we would need to jump through to achieve this, I thought again. After all, we all do this for fun, and it tends to stop being fun when you have to deal with lawyers and paperwork. We’re developers, not corporate moguls, and since we can’t afford to hire any corporate mogul to do all the dull stuff, the only option left was to release OGRE under the LGPL instead.
The other driver was that other high-profile open-source engines are already LGPL, like CrystalSpace. This change puts OGRE on a level playing field with these engines license-wise, so people can choose between them on merit alone.